Engine off.
"Down."
I'm already moving. Footwell, pack against my chest, head below the dash. The truck goes cold immediately and the windshield starts fogging from my breath and my heart is so loud I can feel it in my throat.
"There was a vehicle in that turnout," he says, quiet and even. "Not Beauchamp's. Someone's come in behind us on the road, which means Voclain found the spur faster than I expected." He doesn't say I'm sorry. He doesn't say I should have seen thiscoming. He just says: "I'm going to deal with it. Twenty minutes. Don't come up."
"Rafe."
"If I'm not back, reverse out to the gate and go up to the cabin. Beauchamp has my coordinates. He'll come to you." His hand rests on the top of my head for just a second, warm and steady through the flannel. "Don't come up until I say."
The door opens and closes and he's gone and the silence that follows is enormous.
I press my face into the pack and close my eyes and count.
One. Two. Three.
He went left, uphill, into the trees. His footsteps disappeared inside the first few seconds and I know that's deliberate and it doesn't help. The cold comes up through the floor. The windshield fogs. The mountain is completely silent in the way that mountains are silent when something is moving through them.
Thirty. Forty. Fifty.
I press my thumb into the bandage until the pain is sharp and specific and focus on that. I think about the kindling splitting along the grain yesterday, clean and sudden. I think about his hand brushing cedar dust off my cheek. I think about last night, his forehead against mine, his voice certain and low in the dark. I said yes and I meant it down to my bones and if he doesn't come back out of those trees I will have spent five days with a man I loved completely and said it once, in a moving truck, which is the most I will have managed.
One hundred twenty. One hundred eighty.
The job is twelve hundred seconds. If I get to twelve hundred he hasn't come back and I drive, and I do not think about what that means, I just drive, because it's what he asked for and he has never asked me for anything that wasn't the right thing.
Two hundred. Two hundred forty.
I think about all the things I should have said and didn't. All the moments over the last five days when I held the words back because I told myself I was being careful, and what I was actually being was a coward. I can reconstruct three years of financial crime from a rounding error in an offshore account but I could not look at a man standing in a doorway and say four words without waiting until he was bleeding.
Two hundred eighty. Three hundred.
Two sounds, close together. Flat, hard, specific.
My hands go over my ears before I've decided to move them. I press my face into the pack and bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste blood and I do not move because he told me not to move.
Three hundred sixty. Four hundred. Four hundred twenty.
Silence.
Four hundred forty.
The silence is worse than the shots were because the silence has room for every terrible probability and I am running all of them, I cannot stop, my accountant brain building the columns I do not want —
Boots on gravel. One set. Heavy. Slightly uneven.
The driver's door opens.
"Up."
His voice. The same voice, low and even and alive, and my whole body goes boneless with relief.
I come up.
He's in the driver's seat, hand pressed against his right side, jacket dark and wet beneath it and getting worse.
My hands fly to him and pull back because I know better than to touch a wound I don't understand but every part of me is screaming.
